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South Carolina Senate Primary

The South Carolina Republican Party is holding a runoff election after no candidate received at least fifty per cent of the vote in the Senate primary earlier this month. The two top finishers, Darline Graham and Ralph Norman, are competing to replace Senator Lindsey Graham—who died earlier this summer—in November’s general election. Darline, Lindsey’s sister, is a disability advocate and the former commissioner of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind. She has been serving as senator on an interim basis, and has received President Donald Trump’s endorsement. In a recent debate, however, she faced criticism for failing to answer a question about U.S. security concerns in the South China Sea, saying, “I’m not that informed on national security.” Norman, a five-term congressman from South Carolina, has been endorsed by several Trump allies, including the Utah senator Mike Lee and the South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace. Norman is an election denier and, in 2021, encouraged Trump to declare martial law ahead of President Joe Biden’s Inauguration.

This month, at an Oval Office event resounding with outlandish statements, President Trump signed an executive order called “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans.” His order cut the number of vaccines the federal government recommends for all children from seventeen to eleven. It threatened legal action against states that don’t grant expansive exemptions from vaccine mandates. And it proposed that the vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.), which is currently combined to curb costs and reduce the total number of injections that children receive, be separated into three different shots.

In his remarks, Trump repeated a debunked theory that vaccines are linked to rising autism rates. He claimed, incorrectly, that doctors were injecting doses “the size of a bottle of soda” into tiny bodies, and argued that the M.M.R. shot “can be explosive” and “quite lethal.” (M.M.R. vaccines have been administered hundreds of millions of times, and have contributed to saving millions of lives while causing meaningful side effects in only the tiniest minority of cases.) During the event, he made sure to thank “the man who has done more than perhaps anyone else to bring about this real revolution”—the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Trump’s executive order, which was not supported by any major independent medical organization, is perhaps the Administration’s most forthright attempt yet to upend federal vaccine recommendations. It has been touted as a major victory for R.F.K., Jr., whose time as Health Secretary has dismayed the public-health community. Under Kennedy, vaccine skeptics have been elevated to prominent positions and public-health agencies have suppressed the publication of scientific reports that diverge from his preferred narrative. (Officials have said that the reports were pulled owing to methodological concerns.) Parents are increasingly asking pediatricians to delay, space out, or altogether forgo immunizations for their children. State lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills to weaken immunization rules and access, or to undermine trust in vaccines. There’s been a sharp uptick in the number of kindergarteners deemed exempt from such mandates; in some states, more than one in every eight remains unvaccinated against a preventable disease. Under the second Trump Administration, the United States has recorded more measles cases than it did in the preceding twenty-eight years.

It’s reasonable to worry that the R.F.K., Jr., era has set American science and medicine back in ways that might not be corrected for years, if ever. Yet it’s also possible to read Kennedy’s efforts, especially the new vaccine recommendations, less as triumphs than as flailing attempts to enact an unwelcome vision. Kennedy and his agenda are hardly popular. Public trust in the agencies he leads has fallen. The latest order, like prior attempts to undermine established vaccine guidance, will surely face legal challenges that limit its scope and impact.

Kennedy has argued that “there is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” and that the COVID shot was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” But, as the nation’s top health official, he has struggled to actualize his maximalist rhetoric in the way that other Administration officials have theirs. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security says that it deported more than half a million people in the President’s first year back in office, sending some to countries they’ve never been to. The Department of Justice has launched pretextual prosecutions against the President’s political opponents. Elon Musk bragged about throwing U.S.A.I.D., an agency estimated to have saved millions of lives around the world, into a “wood chipper.” In the meantime, measles immunization rates among kindergarteners have fallen by less than one per cent. The share of kindergarteners with formal exemptions from vaccine mandates rose from 3.6 per cent to 4.2 per cent. These are troubling developments, to be sure, and enough to contribute to an unprecedented rise in infections. But, for now, we are not living in the worst-case scenarios that some envisioned when Kennedy took office. A year and a half into his tenure, is R.F.K., Jr., winning or losing?

A century ago, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned for his opposition to Mussolini’s Fascist regime. In his “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci continued to advocate for social change, but, fearing censorship, developed a metaphor based on the trench warfare of the First World War. Society, he argued, could be transformed through a “war of maneuver” or a “war of position.” A war of maneuver refers to the abrupt seizure of political control, such as Germany’s invasion of Belgium or the Bolshevik overthrow of the tsarist government in Russia. A war of position, in contrast, proceeds slowly, wielding what Gramsci called “cultural hegemony” to shape how people see the world. Wars of maneuver win territory; wars of position win hearts and minds.

In the American context, the civil-rights movement was arguably a war of position, and so was the fight for marriage equality. Both culminated in victorious maneuvers—transformative legislation, Supreme Court decisions that expanded rights—but they were preceded by decades of cultural change. In Gramsci’s telling, wars of maneuver could succeed where the state had a tight grip and the institutions of civil society (churches, schools, unions, professional organizations, the press) were weak and malleable, as in Imperial Russia. But in Western nations he perceived a more equal balance between the state and civil-society institutions. The government was “only an outer ditch,” Gramsci wrote, “behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.” This meant that winning a war of maneuver, whether in a coup or in a transformative election, might not be enough to effect lasting change. Indeed, Italian Fascism toppled at the end of the Second World War.

Before R.F.K., Jr., became Health Secretary, he argued that “the people who run our vaccine programs should be in jail” and compared their work to that of Nazi death camps. He accused them agency of covering up mass harm to children, arguing that “the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church is a perfect metaphor.” He suggested that after some children are immunized, “three months later their brain is gone,” and that doctors giving vaccines have “butchered” children and “poisoned an entire generation.” He said that he would “do anything” to go back in time and not immunize his own children. When he became Health Secretary, he was determined to change the system that he had long criticized. He reportedly wanted to abolish the childhood-vaccine schedule and dedicate more than a tenth of the N.I.H. budget to studying supposed links between vaccines and autism. (An H.H.S. spokesperson contacted by Reuters disputed that Kennedy wanted to abolish the schedule; the N.I.H. proposal was eventually dropped.)

Kennedy certainly made news for his maneuvers. He eliminated a quarter of the H.H.S. workforce at the direction of DOGE, removed the heads of research institutes, dismantled programs that protect against environmental toxins and infectious diseases, and replaced the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a key C.D.C. vaccine-advisory group, with handpicked selections. But the net result was chaos, not coherent change. Kennedy’s mass layoffs, for instance, were carried out in such a haphazard fashion that he later described roughly twenty per cent of them as possible errors. He hadn’t meant to terminate a C.D.C. program dedicated to preventing lead poisoning in children, for example. “Personnel that should not have been cut were cut,” Kennedy said. Some of the fired employees have since been asked to return.

For all the damage that Kennedy has inflicted, his actions on vaccines have largely been piecemeal and procedural. He attempted to delay some infants’ first hepatitis-B vaccine dose by at least a few months, a move that could needlessly expose thousands of newborns to the virus, but was temporarily blocked by a federal judge on the ground that the illegally constituted ACIP had recommended the change. Without consulting C.D.C. scientists, Kennedy announced, on X, that healthy children and pregnant women no longer need the COVID vaccine—but, even before the announcement, less than fifteen per cent of children and pregnant women were getting the shot. “I’m actually somewhat surprised that he hasn’t totally gotten rid of COVID vaccines,” David Gorski, a surgeon at Wayne State University who manages the blog Science-Based Medicine, told me. “I think he’s probably just discovering that the bureaucracy is more difficult to move than he thought.”

Kennedy has arguably been constrained, not unleashed, under Trump. “Even a lot of Republicans don’t want to go where Kennedy wants to go,” Dorit Reiss, a vaccine-policy scholar at U.C. Law San Francisco, told me. White House advisers have argued that his vision would be politically injurious ahead of the midterms. Around the time that a prominent Republican pollster circulated a memo saying that “vaccine skepticism is bad politics,” one official said that the Administration was “done” with the issue. G.O.P. lawmakers also know that most of their constituents want to maintain access to vaccines. And so, for the most part, the Administration has not withdrawn its support for specific vaccines, a move that could spur insurance companies and public vaccination programs to stop covering them. Instead, it has issued far more muted advice, such as “shared clinical decision-making” between doctors and patients. After Kennedy swapped in his own people on the C.D.C.’s vaccine-advisory committee, Fiona Havers, an infectious-disease specialist and a former C.D.C. official, had a “huge fear” that children would lose access to immunizations, she told me. “But I think the Administration quickly realized that denying insurance coverage for vaccines was not a headline that played well.”

Even the recent effort to replace the combined M.M.R. vaccine with separate shots for measles, mumps, and rubella may have little effect. Such a change would likely lower vaccine uptake by making it more difficult for children to get all the vaccinations they need. But, in practice, separate shots for measles, mumps, and rubella aren’t even available in the U.S. Manufacturers estimate that it could take them a decade to bring them to market. Reiss told me that she is deeply concerned about the damage Kennedy has done: “He’s smashed norms of good governance—he’s done things by fiat in a non-deliberative, non-transparent way.” At the same time, she said, “He hasn’t wrecked our vaccine infrastructure in ways that can’t be fixed if a science-based Administration comes into power.” If the culmination of Kennedy’s crusade against vaccines is a set of narrow, legally contested, and reversible recommendations—recommendations plainly rejected by most medical professionals—then it is hard to argue that his war of maneuver has gained that much ground.

Of course, Trump and Kennedy are engaged in a war of position, too: they are working to change minds as well as policy. Trump won the election in 2024 by a greater margin than he had in 2016, and Kennedy has made meaningful strides toward normalizing his vaccine-skeptical views. Children’s Health Defense, an advocacy group that Kennedy helped bring to prominence, has become a leading purveyor of pseudoscience; a 2019 study found that, along with one other group, the organization had purchased more anti-vaccine Facebook advertisements than any other. Kennedy himself ranks among the “Disinformation Dozen,” as the Center for Countering Digital Hate labelled the twelve individuals who spread a large proportion of misleading medical information during the pandemic. Worryingly, the share of Americans who say that it’s very or extremely important that parents get their children vaccinated has fallen sharply in recent decades. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, which got its name just two years ago, now counts more than forty per cent of the country as supporters.

There’s reason to think that even these gains are less dramatic than they appear, though. Support for MAHA depends heavily on MAGA, the Trumpian movement after which it was named. And the most important issue to MAHA voters is not the abolition of vaccines but the affordability of health care. According to the health-news site KFF, only a tenth of the movement’s supporters cite vaccines as their top priority, and nearly eighty per cent of parents in the movement believe that the M.M.R. shot is safe. After South Carolina experienced a major measles outbreak last year, vaccination surged; in one hard-hit area, nearly twice as many M.M.R. doses were administered in early 2026 than had been in the same period of the previous year. Today, the vast majority of Americans still say that they trust doctors and scientists for information about their health. Faith in Kennedy started low and has fallen further. Just after he took office, almost half of Americans disapproved of him; in an April poll, sixty per cent of voters did.

“Things could be worse” is no cause for celebration. Rather, it should be a call to action. Gramsci argued that the period between an old order and a new one was a “time of monsters,” when extreme movements and dangerous leaders reared their heads. Confronting them required a “pessimism of the intellect”—a readiness to take the peril seriously—in addition to an “optimism of the will.” The battle for sound vaccine policy and effective public health is worth fighting, and it is winnable. Earlier this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups prevailed in a lawsuit against Kennedy’s reconstitution of the C.D.C.’s vaccine-advisory committee, stalling its overhaul of the childhood-vaccine schedule (the government has appealed). State governments have banded together to develop their own vaccine guidance, rejecting the recommendations of an increasingly unreliable federal government. The nation’s largest association of health insurers has committed to continue covering, at no cost to patients, all ACIP-recommended immunizations, at least through the end of next year. It can be easy to feel hopeless in the face of a senseless assault on science. But it is not too late to shore up the fortresses and earthworks. Many still appear to be holding—for now. ♦

In 2019, Nichol Cano, an otherwise healthy mother of three in Fresno, California, began experiencing worsening headaches. She had no history of headaches; they had seemed to start after a liposuction surgery in Tijuana, Mexico. She saw her primary-care doctor and then a neurologist, who diagnosed her as having migraines. She was given a standard migraine treatment—an injection and a pill—but her pain only intensified. “It felt like my skull was being crushed and my eyes were going to pop out of my head,” she told me. She went to a local E.R., which again treated her for migraines and sent her home. A few weeks later, Cano’s husband, Javier, was at work, supervising a manufacturing warehouse, when he received an incoherent voice mail from Cano. She was alone at home, disoriented. Eventually, an ambulance came and rushed her to the hospital.

This time, E.R. doctors performed a spinal tap: a needle was poked into her back to collect a sample of cerebrospinal fluid. She recalls the doctors telling her that her opening pressure, which reflects the force that the fluid exerts on the brain, was the highest that they had ever seen. The result strongly suggested meningitis—an inflammation around the brain and spinal cord often caused by bacteria, viruses, or other pathogens—yet a battery of tests failed to detect any underlying infection. The doctors speculated that a fungus might be responsible, but they didn’t want to give her potentially toxic antifungal drugs without first confirming their hunch. “They were saying there was nothing more they could do,” Cano said.

A doctor on Cano’s team had heard about a new and powerful type of genetic testing called metagenomics, which can search for thousands of different microorganisms in a single sweep. The doctor reached out to Michael Wilson, a leader in the field of metagenomics who works as a neuroinfectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Within a week, Cano was in Wilson’s office, describing her ordeal. He arranged for her to be admitted to U.C.S.F. “We’re going to figure this out, and you’re going to be fine,” he told her.

The usual way of diagnosing an uncommon infection could be compared to finding a loose page in a library and trying to determine which book it came from. The page will surely contain clues—maybe the subject matter points to a particular shelf, or the author uses telltale turns of phrase—but sometimes a match can’t be found. There are diagnostic tests for many conditions, but a doctor’s list of potential diagnoses may be long, and the culprit might be too rare to come readily to mind. Metagenomics, in contrast, works more like a search of the entire Google Books database. First, scientists sequence the full range of genetic material in a patient’s sample. Then they compare what they’ve found to a vast data set of known pathogens. Matches can reveal infections that doctors either could not culture in a laboratory or never thought to look for.

At U.C.S.F., Cano underwent another spinal tap as Wilson tried to find the cause of her headaches. His colleagues sequenced all of the genetic material that they could find in her cerebrospinal fluid and ran it through their genetic library of pathogens. At last, metagenomics produced a match: Candida parapsilosis, a yeast that typically lives on our skin without causing harm. “She had no business having yeast in her cerebrospinal fluid,” Wilson told me. One item in Cano’s medical history stood out to him: before her liposuction procedure in Tijuana, she’d received an injection of epidural anesthesia near her spinal cord. He now suspects that it was contaminated.

When Cano finally learned what was making her sick, she broke down in tears. Treatment for the fungus was gruelling: she was put on two potent antifungals, one of which caused vivid hallucinations, and she needed a shunt in her head to relieve pressure on her brain. Seven years later, the shunt remains in place, and she only recently stopped taking antifungal medications. Still, she told me, “My body feels stronger, and I know I’m going to be O.K.”

Infectious microorganisms have beleaguered humanity for far longer than people have been able to see and understand them. In the late seventeenth century, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a self-taught Dutch scientist, used a handmade microscope to observe what he called “animacules”—tiny living organisms—in rainwater. Two centuries later, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch helped establish germ theory, which holds that many diseases are caused by infectious agents that multiply in the body. Koch devised a method for growing bacteria in a shallow glass dish; Julius Petri improved on it by adding a snug lid. It was now possible for doctors to culture many of the pathogens that make us sick.

Microbial cultures were a major advance, but they had limits. The bacterium that causes tuberculosis, for example, grows very slowly, so culturing a sample to diagnose an infection can take weeks. Many other fungi, parasites, and viruses are difficult or impossible to culture. The advent of polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, testing, in the nineteen-eighties, enabled scientists to make numerous copies of the DNA or RNA in a sample, and that dramatically increased the sensitivity of diagnostic tests. But this method still required doctors to know what they were looking for, and to test for each pathogen one at a time. A patient with respiratory symptoms could be PCR-tested for influenza, rhinovirus, and RSV, but, if all of them came back negative, then the underlying cause remained unknown.

Then, in 2001, a biochemistry professor at U.C.S.F. named Joe DeRisi worked with several colleagues to develop what they called the ViroChip. Building on research that he had conducted as a graduate student at Stanford, DeRisi programmed a robot to print DNA snippets from every virus that had been fully sequenced onto glass slides. When scientists collected samples from a patient’s viral infection, tagged them with a fluorescent dye, and placed them on the ViroChip, a particular spot on the slide would glow, revealing what kind of virus it was. The chip could even help identify never-before-seen infections. In 2003, DeRisi used the ViroChip to help determine the cause of a mysterious infectious outbreak in East Asia: a novel coronavirus later named SARS-CoV. (It is now called SARS-CoV-1, and the virus that causes COVID-19 is SARS-CoV-2.) He became convinced that metagenomics could transform the science of diagnosis.

Wilson joined DeRisi’s lab at U.C.S.F. in 2013. One day, a pediatric-medicine professor at the University of Wisconsin offhandedly told them about an immunocompromised fourteen-year-old boy who had been repeatedly hospitalized with severe meningoencephalitis. Aggressive treatments weren’t working, the colleague said, and conventional testing—including a biopsy of the boy’s brain—had not revealed what was making him sick. Metagenomic testing on his cerebrospinal fluid ultimately found Leptospira, the bacteria that cause leptospirosis. He’d probably acquired it while swimming in Puerto Rico, where he was on a missionary trip. The boy was ultimately cured with intravenous penicillin. After that, the team was inundated with requests from doctors seeking diagnostic help. DeRisi,Wilson, a collaborator named Charles Chiu, and several others co-founded a company called Delve Bio, which specializes in metagenomic testing of cerebrospinal fluid.

In May, I visited a glass-and-steel building on the outskirts of Boston that serves as Delve Bio’s East Coast headquarters. A tiny plastic tube of cerebrospinal fluid had just been shipped to the company—from a patient with an unknown infection or inflammatory disorder in their central nervous system. I watched two technicians in gowns and surgical masks place the tube in a centrifuge, a circular machine that shook it violently. (Brad Murray, Delve’s C.E.O. and one of the company’s co-founders, told me that extracting genetic material from any fungi that might be in the sample was “like trying to get the meat out of a walnut.”) When the shaking stopped, the sample was removed and then readied for sequencing. In a sequencer that resembled a large fridge, millions of short nucleic-acid fragments would be identified in the span of ten hours. The data were then uploaded to a cloud-based analysis platform to determine whether any of the snippets came from fully sequenced pathogens. By the following day, metagenomic testing on the sample would reveal a bacterium that can be treated with a new, targeted antibiotic, and which the patient’s doctors hadn’t tried yet.

As Murray told me about cases that Delve has helped solve, I was reminded just how diverse infectious diseases can be. A ten-year-old with the same type of shunt as Cano turned out to be infected with a novel species of Moraxella, a bacterium that normally lives in the upper airways. A sixtysomething woman, who was confused and struggling to walk, was found to have neurocysticercosis, a disease in which microscopic tapeworm larvae colonize the brain. I had memorized lists of these pathogens in medical school, but as a physician I rarely encountered them in my clinical practice. They probably wouldn’t have made it onto my list of potential diagnoses.

The applications of metagenomics go far beyond medicine. It’s possible to sequence all of the DNA in a spoonful of pond water, for example, to get a sense of which species live there. If you detect invasive algae, you might launch a campaign to clean it up; if you find an endangered frog, you might halt development in the area to save it. DeRisi told me how, a few years ago, there was a large die-off of leopard sharks in the San Francisco Bay. Autopsies on the sharks showed extensive bleeding in their brains—a sign that they’d died from infection. Using metagenomics, DeRisi’s team, in collaboration with the California Fish and Wildlife agency, identified the culprit as Miamiensis avidus, a parasite not previously known to infect leopard sharks. It probably hitched a ride into the bay on runoff from heavy rains. “The beauty of a hypothesis-free approach,” DeRisi told me, “is that, when you’re confronted with the data, you can’t be weighed down by your cognitive biases of what you think is wrong.”

Of course, a technique that involves millions of genetic fragments might also create millions of opportunities to be misled. Shangxin Yang, a clinical microbiologist at U.C.L.A. who has studied metagenomics for fifteen years, told me about an immunocompromised patient who was treated with antifungals after fungal DNA turned up in metagenomic blood tests. Only later did doctors realize that the genetic material had probably come from a mushroom that the patient had consumed, and not from a pathogen. “We are starting to see a lot of things that we didn’t expect,” Yang told me. The scale of the sequencing, and of the reference data sets, makes it difficult to detect a reliable signal in the noise. Our bodies are colonized by trillions of cells from hundreds of microbial species, and they may show up in metagenomic tests even if they don’t cause any harm. One large study, published in 2019, found that nearly twenty-three per cent of healthy people had microbial DNA in their blood.

Patricia Simner, who directs the clinical-microbiology molecular laboratory at the Mayo Clinic, told me that some genetic libraries of pathogens are painstakingly curated for accuracy, but others are peppered with inaccuracies. In one study of five thousand healthy individuals, for example, researchers thought that they’d found fifty types of bacteria that were significantly more common in males than in females. The finding turned out to be an illusion: the reference sequences for the bacteria erroneously included fragments of the human Y chromosome. “These microbial reference libraries are enormous, and they’re constantly changing,” Simner told me.

The sensitivity of metagenomic testing also depends heavily on the type of sample being tested. Cerebrospinal fluid bathes the brain and spinal cord, so it is particularly useful for detecting infections in those tissues. Metagenomic testing on blood samples, which is also becoming more common, is not always conclusive; localized infections don’t always reach the bloodstream. Indeed, when Yang and his colleagues studied the outcomes of a thousand metagenomic blood tests, they found that the results meaningfully improved patient care in only sixteen per cent of cases. Ishminder Kaur, an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at U.C.L.A. and a lead author of the study, told me that metagenomic testing shouldn’t be ordered automatically. “In the right patient and the right situation, it’s a good add-on test,” she told me. “It’s not a replacement for getting tissue from the source of infection.”

Yang worries that some clinicians are approaching metagenomics much as they are approaching artificial intelligence: they are rushing to adopt the technology without adequately studying its limitations. “We believe that technology can solve all our problems,” he told me. “This is very different from years ago, when we used to learn it before we used it.” The risk is that doctors treat the results of metagenomics tests as an ultimate truth, rather than what it is: another data point requiring interpretation.

None of these concerns has dampened Yang’s enthusiasm for metagenomics, however. The technology’s promise was on display this spring, when metagenomics helped identify the cause of a sickness aboard the M.V. Hondius cruise ship: the Andes hantavirus. Around the same time, hospitals in Ituri province, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, began to fill up with patients suffering from fevers, diarrhea, and vomiting. Tests for malaria and typhoid fever came back negative, as did PCR tests for the common Zaire strain of Ebola. Only weeks later, in mid-May, did clinicians send patient samples to Kinshasa, the capital of the D.R.C., for metagenomic analysis. Within sixteen hours, sequencing had identified the virus that was making people sick: the Bundibugyo variant of Ebola. The problem wasn’t that the PCR tests had been wrong; after all, the patients did not have the strain of Ebola for which they were tested. The problem, it seemed, was that the patients had received the wrong kind of test. ♦

My parents lived in the same brutalist-Art Nouveau home for fifty-one years. (They never could agree on an aesthetic.) During that time, they accumulated the contents of a much larger house and crammed them into their much smaller one. They are gone now, following a pickleball accident that I am not legally permitted to discuss, except to note that one first responder described the scene as “wild.” The estate sale lasted three days. The following items did not move, so I am listing them here, on Facebook Marketplace.

An invitation to my father’s bris, 1942
Engraved. Reads, in a formal, serif font: “You are cordially invited.” Also: “No admission without card.” My father is gone and I cannot ask him why his parents were worried about party-crashers. This question will haunt me. Price: $15, firm.

A box of toffees commemorating the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer
Purchased in a passing fit of royal enthusiasm before my parents pledged allegiance to the Basque-separatist cause. Most of the toffees remain in their original wrappers. Price: $8.

A mango-strawberry vape
Approximately forty per cent remaining. My mother was eighty when she took up vaping, a detail that my siblings and I learned only while preparing for the estate sale. The brand is called Cloud Nine. Price: $2.

A Weber grill assembly manual
For a model discontinued in 1987. Annotated by my father. The marginalia is extensive and occasionally personal. On page 4, next to a diagram of the grease trap, he has written: “This is where it all goes wrong.” Price: $0.50.

A ceramic rooster
Of unclear provenance and considerable size. My mother called it Apollinaire. She could not, when asked, recall where Apollinaire had come from, or why she had named it Apollinaire. She did, however, dust Apollinaire weekly for the better part of three decades. A home must be found. Price: on second thought, I’m keeping Apollinaire.

A set of “Learn Portuguese in 30 Days” cassettes
Still sealed in the original cellophane. My parents never went to Portugal. They discussed going to Portugal extensively, over many years, in a way that seemed to serve some function other than actually going to Portugal. Price: $5.

A sealed envelope
Labelled “GOOD BUTTONS.” Price: $1.

Seventeen years’ worth of National Geographics
Stacked by my father in order of “least to most erotic.” Price: $400.

A single ski boot
Left, size 10. My parents hung on to it in the hope that its mate would materialize. They didn’t ski. Price: $15.

A sympathy card, unsent
Addressed to a “Meredith” we cannot identify, containing a handwritten message that reads: “We are thinking of you during this impossible time. The casserole freezes well.” Price: free, if you are Meredith.

A sealed envelope
Labelled “BAD BUTTONS.” Price: $12.

One genuine Hummel figurine
And eleven X-rated figurines that my mother was “fairly confident” were also Hummels. Price: $1,500.

A Tupperware container
Holding exactly fourteen batteries, all very dead, but somehow also very warm. Price: free.

A hospital bill
From my birth, with my mother’s handwriting on the back demanding a discount because she “did all the work.” Price: $1.

A coupon for fifty cents off Metamucil
Expired June, 2019. I include it here not because I expect it to sell but because it was tucked inside my parents’ copy of “The Joy of Cooking,” which was shelved in the kitchen, alphabetically, next to their annotated copy of “The Joy of Sex,” on page 27 of which, in my father’s writing, appears: “This is where it all goes wrong.” Price: free. ♦